Everest finally hits a wide release today. Find out what we thought.
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| "Look over there! A spaceship below the ice with an alien in it that we're gonna thaw out and its going to kill us all except for Kurt Russell." |
In May 1996, eight mountain climbers
from around the world attempting to scale the summit of Mount Everest lost their lives after
getting caught in a blizzard and freezing to death. It became one of the most publicized fatal
natural disasters in living memory, spawning a still controversial debate over
profiteering on the commercializing of the deadly location. While the unthinkable was occurring on one
side of the mountain, an IMAX crew with their own sets of 70mm cameras were
busily making a film about Mount Everest before the tragedy inevitably crept
its way into the finished documentary in 1998.
Journalist and fellow climber Jon Krakauer published
his own written account of the ordeal entitled Into Thin Air. After the
Mountain accumulated as many as 200 fatalities with their frozen bodies still
locked in the ice and rock, now here is Everest,
an IMAX 3D dramatization of the fateful May 1996 tragedy. Using a combination of natural locations and
CGI enhancement, Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur has more or less
successfully reenacted the events that claimed the lives of those who dared to
dream the impossible. The question is,
do you want to pay $15 apiece to watch nearly everybody onscreen slowly perish
to hypothermia and frostbite?
At first as a movie, Everest takes the impersonal Perfect
Storm approach to the disaster with a minor character development and
greater emphasis on the ensemble seen from afar. Considering the strength of the cast
including Jake Gyllenhaal, Emily Watson, Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, Robin
Wright and Keira Knightley, it’s a little disappointing to see their talent
underutilized despite the physicality of traversing the daunting terrain. Since we’re well aware these were real
people, many of whom would not survive this ordeal, I was hoping the film would
allow me to know them more than just another broadly drawn archetype. There are even a couple moments of editing
that felt disjointed as the film leaps from character to character with some
people I don’t even recall receiving a proper introduction.
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| "No wait. Look over there instead. In that direction, there's far better movies about people dying in bad snowy accidents." |
That said, learning more about these
characters is secondary to the film’s real aim which is to show Mount Everest
as a brutally unforgiving graveyard that’s far more Hell than Heaven and begs
the question whether or not it’s worth all the grief and heartache. Released exclusively in IMAX 3D before the
impending general release (though 2D will leave viewers feeling just as
depressed), Everest is determined to
convey what it must have felt like to be pummeled by avalanches, depleting
oxygen, punishing snowstorms finally to die a slow death in below zero
temperatures. The sights of suffocating
white outs and piercing sounds of wind and bristling snow blasting against
tents and snowsuits undoubtedly make Everest
one of the most difficult films to sit through ever released in IMAX 3D as
the frozen bodies pile up before being obscured in snow and ice.
After seeing the stories on the local news regarding
the 1996 tragedy, having seen actual photos of the frozen bodies and now this
film I am still just as perplexed by the impetus behind scaling Mount Everest
as I was then. It’s such an obvious
human meat grinder unfit for life yet people continue to march towards their
deaths like lemmings waiting to descend the edge of the cliff. If you’re like me and feel only insanity or a
death wish could account for so many people laying their lives on the line for
such a risky endeavor, Everest will
do nothing to change that perception.
For those who scaled the summit and lived to tell about it, I’m sure it
was a life changing experience for them.
But as Everest shows in its
ongoing exposure of multiple human tragedies, it probably isn’t worth the
hardship and grief for those left behind.
Even while we’re contemplating all this over the course of the movie,
those bodies are still up there on Mount Everest.
Score
-Andrew Kotwicki
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